All Girl Saturday!

This past weekend all the twitchy guys were elsewhere. My husband and youngest son were at Grandma’s house, going through my father-in-law’s collection of crud and tools, to see what they might want to have. I suspected they’d wind up staying overnight, since I’ve seen the piles. My oldest was working a marathon shift at Pizza Hut; apparently they were celebrating their liberation from the tyrannical industrial Pork Rind known as Pepsico, and my daughter and I were here at home.

We smiled at each other a lot. We would encounter one another in between tasks and beam, saying, “Gosh, this is nice and quiet” or “Wow, I can’t believe how relaxed I am!” We decided to have a Girls’ Day – popcorn, soda pop, and chick flicks. We settled in on the couches in front of the big screen TV, popped “Chasing Liberty” into the VCR, and Hoover clambered up on a couch and fell asleep, dreaming, we generally suppose, of being King of the Turkey Wall, because his feet twitch while he sleeps.

There we were, one unconscious Labrador, two gals, a chick flick, and quiet. So, we did what a lot of other girls would do in the same situation. We fell asleep. We woke up at the end of the movie, looked at each other and said, “well, I feel rested now, how about you?” We got a good giggle out of ourselves. It was Bunny’s night to fix dinner, so she toddled off, made delicious spaghetti from scratch (ha! I taught her!), which we enjoyed. Then we gave the movie another try.

It’s not much of a movie, really. I don’t know if it’s the mere presence of Mandy Moore that turns any movie into a shallow, caricature-filled teen flick, or if it was bad writing, or some kind of nutso adolescent male interpretation of girls, or a combination of two or more of those elements. It’s just a dumb, largely insulting movie. We watched it anyway, holding forth, one at time, pointing our fingers at the screen, advising poor Mandy as to what was wrong with what she was doing. She persisted in being a goofus, despite our best efforts.

Because that’s one of the things chicks do when they’re together – they criticize dumb chick flicks and watch them anyway. We also filled in blank spots with talking about Bunny’s friends and problems and successes at school, swapping warm wooly socks (same size feet), howling over dumb jokes, and shared a bowl of popcorn. We stopped short of painting each other’s toenails, although that’s another chick thing. It was fun. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a girls’ night.

Mostly, Bunny communes with her textbooks during the evening or watches Law & Order, of which she is a big fan. I’m usually proctoring Doodle because his meds are on the wane and he mutates into TwitchnFidget, not getting much homework done unless he’s got a body double. Spawn is usually stomping through the house, in an adolescent conniption over something that the rest of us are clearly to stupid to understand, so he just glares at us in impotent frustration instead. Hubs relaxes by watching Bang-Clank guy TV. So, this was a special night. No bang-clank, no twitching, no teen ragefest. Oh, feel the silence, the girlish camaraderie, the pink peace!

The boys all returned in full force the next day. Bunny and I winked at each other at each new explosion from Spawn, sympathized with each other quietly when passing through the living room to hear “Dirty Jobs” or a car race on the TV, and found things for Doodle to do to keep him from twitching at us. Everything was back to normal. Sigh.

I hope we have another Girls’ night soon.